Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi Episode 2 Anime Review

And in my spare time I join body-building competitions. I get wicked muscles from hauling grown men and women around.

Episode 2 of Sunday Without God opens with our protagonist being schooled on what a perfect gravekeeper should be. Emotionless, robotic, and with a built-in search engine. I think I would go crazy acting like that, much less a 12 year old. Well, our heroine and her new “friend” get accosted by Julie and they get philosophical chatting about his dead wife.

Ai reminds me a lot of Card Captor Sakura’s heroine, mainly due to the similar hairstyles the two have and their spunky spirit. But from here, the two anime differ, since Sunday Without God deals with death, specifically Death without really dying.

It’s an interesting take on an overly done genre – zombies. In this case, the zombies are all normal-looking and talk and go about their daily business. They have to be killed by gravekeepers – people with shovels that look like giant antique teaspoons.

It raises the interesting question of whether it’s really humane to kill these people and put them to rest, or is it better to end their “misery”. Are they really miserable like this? I haven’t read the manga, so I don’t know more about the circumstances of the world and the underlying theory of it to fully answer that question. A similar position Ai is in, probably. And while the anime is a pleasant watch, it doesn’t prompt me to read the manga because I’m not that interested enough yet.

I think what the anime is missing, or the manga, is that the main character does not have high stakes involved yet. When comparing it with other successful manga, the main characters have all lost something big at the start, and they set out to try and correct or redeem themselves. Ai, while a well written character, seems to lack the deep sense of loss and there is no urgency since she has no power to change anything in her world yet, beyond just going around to bury people which is a reactive action. She’s just being tugged around by Hambart, the immortal grey-haired guy, even in episode 2. This missing elements results in a beginning that has no tension in terms of story-telling.

It should be interesting to see how this anime develops, since the world created is an interesting and beautiful one.